Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday February 10, 2010 @04:40AM
from the find-out-precisely-how-bad-you-are dept.

Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting:
"When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."

It's garbage to include these kinds of tools in a game that is primarily played as multiplayer? Gaming has become a very social activity over the past few years, in case you haven't noticed. Adding social networking to Battle.net is a pretty obvious choice when you see the success of Xbox Live! and PSN as gaming platforms. They do so well because people have the ability to create groups. You can keep in touch with all the people you enjoy playing with instead of just playing endless games against people you don't know. A multiplayer platform without social networking abilities is pretty much an oxymoron today.

That's ok for moders. What about those of us who will not buy StarCraft II without LAN party capability?
I think I irritated a Blizzard employee one time when we met. I told him, I hope Blizzard does not screw up StarCraft II like they did WarCraft III. I hated the look of WCIII and did not even finish the human single player campaign. Thats after paying $70 for the special box set of WarCraft III. If they do not have LAN capability in StarCraft II, I will not even waste my money on purchasing the game.